


Marvel Musical Universe

by RembrandtsWife



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Hozier, Inspired by Music, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 07:17:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3348392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RembrandtsWife/pseuds/RembrandtsWife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Character studies on multiple relationship pairings in the MCU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "Like Real People Do"

**Author's Note:**

> Presented to you unbeta'd and unashamed, these vignettes are the result of a resolution to sit down and WRITE SOMETHING. I've associated some of Hozier's songs with certain pairings for months now, so I took three of those songs and listened to each one on repeat until something emerged. More chapters may occur tomorrow, but after this, I'm going to bed.

Clint wonders about Natasha sometimes. Anyone would, really. When you're sleeping, and sometimes having sex, with a woman who was trained to attract, seduce, disarm, and kill, for whom sex was a weapon pretty much from the first day she had any sexual feelings, you have to wonder.  
It's not that he's afraid of Natasha. He knows she could kill him if she wanted to; he trusts that she won't want to. He trusts himself not to make her want to. It's more that he's afraid for Natasha. It's those moments when he wakes up to piss and sees her sitting up in bed in the darkness, perfectly still, looking at nothing. Sometimes he thinks her eyes reflect the light like a cat's, even though he knows if he looked into her eyes during those night vigils, he would see only darkness circled by a sliver of green, darkness all the way down.  
He saved her life. He brought her in from the cold. He gave her the gift of his body and the chance to start coming home to her own body, to have sex be something for herself and not for her handlers. And she gave him back his mind and what he had of his sanity after Loki. Whatever she thinks, she owes him little now. To see the way she looks at Rogers, the way she dresses when she's off duty, that's reward enough.  
They don't talk about what happened in Budapest. At this Clint isn't sure what really happened. Even before Loki got into his head and started redecorating it as his private palace, he felt he couldn't trust those memories. He has an image that nags him occasionally of what looks like an open grave by the river. There's something on Natasha's slim white hands: Is it blood, or is it dirt? Did he bring her in from the cold, or did she bring him back from the dead?  
Clint thinks that if he thinks about all this too hard, his mind won't be his own again. And this time no one will come into the labyrinth and let him out. So instead he rolls over in bed, wraps his arm around Natasha's waist, and kisses her shoulder. She turns over in his arms with a soft sweet noise, and they kiss like real people do.


	2. "Cherry Wine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky doesn't trust his memories.

Bucky doesn't trust his memories. His memories are actually a lot like the memories of a man his age who lived through all the decades the normal way: The earlier memories are vivid and full-bodied, like a fat red wine, like a good cup of coffee made the old-fashioned way. The more recent ones are blurry and uncertain, the memories his serum-enhanced brain tried to store over the years they were taking him out of the fridge and putting him back like a carton of milk.  
He can remember, clearly, slinging his arm around skinny Steve Rogers' and aching to pull him closer, to pull their bodies together and bury his face in Steve's neck instead of just laughing and giving him noogies and hauling him home. He can remember moments when Steve's eyes, always hooded with weariness back then, drifted over him as if maybe Steve wanted the same thing. When he started to really feel human again, that ache in his chest, that itch in the palms of his hands, that hunger in his mouth were back as strong as ever, and he knew it for what it was. And Steve's eyes were clear and not shadowed any more and he understood.  
But Natasha... he feels something when he looks at Natasha Romanov that he doesn't understand. He can't find a memory to explain why he wants to call her Natalia Alianovna Romanova. How he knows what her full name is, and why English sounds so odd coming from her mouth. He isn't sure why he watches her mouth, full and soft and slightly puckered, with never more than half a smile. He can't figure out why she keeps asking him to spar with her and he keeps saying yes and when one of them draws blood, it seems so right. The blood is rare and sweet as cherry wine.


	3. "From Eden"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky taught Steve how to dance.

Steve still tells anybody who asks him that he doesn't know how to dance. It's not outright a lie, but it's only half-true. It's true that he doesn't know how to just let go and move his body the way people do now and call it dancing. He'll probably never be able to do that.  
The kind of dancing people did when he was growing up, though, that he can do. What he doesn't tell people is that Bucky taught him how to dance, and of course, being a guy and the taller one and at ease in his body, Bucky led. The serum didn't change the fact that Steve never learned how to lead on the dance floor.  
It's a strange kind of dance he and Bucky are doing around each other these days. He had thought he would find Bucky and rescue him and bring him home. Instead everybody but him had glimpsed Bucky, here, there, everywhere, until the day he came back to his Brooklyn apartment after his morning run with a sack full of bagels and there was James Buchanan Barnes sitting on the front stoop, smoking a cig, like nothing had changed since 1935.  
Bucky had consented to be debriefed of everything he knew about HYDRA, which was plenty; had placidly gone to trial for treason and just as placidly been acquitted; had accepted an offer to live with Steve but declined the offer to join the Avengers. He saw a therapist, went to the VA support groups with Steve and Sam, devoted a lot of time to cooking huge meals--his appetite was almost a match for Steve's--and did a lot of small handicraft projects, competently but sort of aimlessly. If you ignored the super-powered prosthetic arm, he wasn't that different from a lot of vets Steve had gotten to know, more functional than many. More functional than Steve, some days. And yet.  
He kept looking at Steve with the old hunger in his eyes, as if his chest were hollow and waiting to be filled. He'd sling an arm around Steve's neck and then back off. Give him a casual punch in the arm and then stare for a moment, sometimes at his own left hand, sometimes at Steve's arm. Pace the apartment in the middle of the night, humming under his breath. It was like Bucky had turned into sand and slipped away under Steve's feet when he approached, turned into water and ran through Steve's fingers when he wanted to hold on.  
"I don't deserve you," he said one night, when Steve found him smoking on the roof. "Not after the things I've done."  
"You had things done to you, Bucky. It wasn't you. If they'd put you in Stark's machine and I'd fallen off that damned train, you'd've been Captain America and I'd've wound up the Winter Soldier."  
Bucky grimaced through a haze of smoke. "You really think that, Stevie? The only reason I'm here right now is that I realized I didn't have anything better to do with my life than sit outside your door."


End file.
